With most of the world bracing for impact after Donald J. Trump has taken office again as President of the United States, scholars and decision-makers around the globe are struggling to make sense of his policies and actions. Does the beginning of the second Trump presidency mark the end of the international rules-based order? Is he trying to run his country as an 18th-century emperor with imperialistic ambitions? Or is the White House now inhabited by a businessman who wants to make deals and outsmart his competitors as if he was CEO of a real-estate company? Many different interpretations of Trump exist, and some may clarify his second presidency, while others perhaps are not so useful. Time will tell, and historians will eventually write new books and chapters — but we do not have time to wait for the clarity of hindsight. Risk is the effect of uncertainty on objects, and all countries right now need to assess and manage the unpredictability created by the outcome of the U.S. elections last year. Most will agree that the 47th U.S. President adds more uncertainty to the equation, and risk management is all about trying to reduce exactly that.
To better understand Trump as risk factor we can visit the so-called “Zoo of Risk” and see if we find an animal that resembles him. The Zoo of Risk is inhabited by metaphors and symbols that may help us illustrate different types of uncertainties and threats and categorize risk.
First up on our tour is the Black Swan. These animals are very rare — until 1697 we didn’t even know they existed because no one besides the indigenous population in Australia had seen one. Drawing on a long philosophical tradition, Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the concept in his 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The Black Swan is often used as a metaphor for events that most people think can’t or won’t happen because they rarely or never occurred before. In the Zoo of Risk, the Black Swan sits in its cage to remind us of the so-called inductive fallacy — the argument that all swans must be white because we have only seen white swans. A single observation of a black swan, however, is enough to falsify this hypothesis about the color of swans.
The fascinating thing about this animal is that once you see it, its existence suddenly seems so obvious. When you pass its cage in the zoo you look at it and say: “Of course there are other colors of swans than white!” And then you start discussing why you should have seen the Black Swan coming, and why nobody predicted it instead of preparing yourselves for future encounters with swans of unexpected colors.
Next on the tour of the Zoo of Risk, we reach the Gray Rhino’s habitat. It is a large, open area with the large animals in plain sight. When we approach them, a female charges towards our group to protect her calf, but luckily a thick fence protects us from her fury. Gray Rhinos represent a class of risk caused by well-known hazards with a high probability of occurrence that may result in large consequences with great loss of life or value. However, even though we can see them right in front of us and know how much it will hurt to be trampled by one, we don’t really do anything to prevent it, nor do we prepare ourselves properly for the potential impact.
Our main risk management strategy towards Gray Rhinos is to rely on luck. We hope that they will simply go away or charge at someone else, and if we nevertheless end up on the receiving end of one of these large, brutal animals’ wrath we’ll attempt a last-minute sprint and hope for the best. Political analyst Michele Wucker coined the concept in The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore (2016), which painfully reveals how leaders refrained from mitigating well-known hazards such as the housing bubble that created the financial crisis in 2008 and the floods that wreaked havoc on New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. COVID-19 could also be categorized as a Gray Rhino, as institutions like the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum and the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board all warned about the risk of an impending global pandemic in the previous years (Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, 2019).
Next up on our tour is the White Elephant — a proud and beautiful yet despised animal in the Zoo of Risk. In ancient Asia they were given as gifts to rivals because they couldn’t be used for labor and were very expensive to maintain. In other words, a White Elephant represents a gift nobody really wants. We admire the specimen in its cage but also notice how frustrated the zookeepers look after years of feeding and nurturing this useless animal. As a financial risk management metaphor, the White Elephant symbolizes an investment or an acquisition not delivering expected returns, but something we still find it difficult to do anything about it due to tradition, lack of agency or “sunk cost.”
The fourth animal on exhibition in the Zoo of Risk is the Black Jellyfish. Quite common in the waters around us, this nasty looking creature can also hurt us with its long arms that release toxins into the skin of whoever the Black Jellyfish encounters. The sting won’t kill a human being, but the pain can last for up to 40 minutes. As a metaphor for risk, the Black Jellyfish is predictable and has a severe impact, but we tend to ignore them simply because they make us uncomfortable. At the NATO summits in 2017, 2018 and 2019, Trump attacked his allies for not contributing enough and suggested that the alliance’s spending target should be doubled to 4 percent of GDP (Richter, 2021). But when he lost the election in 2020, the pressure to increase defense spending swam away until the Black Jellyfish suddenly reappeared four years later.
So, what animal in the Zoo of Risk is Trump? What kind of risk to democracy and decision-making does he pose? We might think of him being elected president for the first time in 2016 as a kind of Black Swan event, as all major prediction sites predicted a victory for Hillary Clinton, although with wide variation in probabilities (Wright & Wright, 2018). Even Trump himself later confessed to have had serious doubts that he would win the presidency even on Election Night (Mills, 2016). He could also be understood as a Gray Rhino — as an obvious implication of a wide-spread dissatisfaction with the traditional works of politics in the U.S. Trump’s battle cry about “draining the swamp” was not his own invention, but rather a phrase used frequently since the 1980s expressing a wish to reduce the influence of special interests, lobbyists and the so-called political elite.
The White Elephant interpretation of Trump as risk could be exemplified when Vice President J.D. Vance described Denmark as “not a good ally” on Fox News over the Greenland controversy in early February 2025. The Danish Prime Minster Mette Frederiksen responded that her country, although small in size and population, stood side by side with the U.S. in Afghanistan, took casualties equal to its larger ally in terms of percentages, and is currently investing heavily in defense to accommodate Trump’s requests for increased security in the Arctic (Zubel, 2025).
Perhaps also the Republican Party will begin to view Trump as a White Elephant during his second term as president. Notably, Senator Mitch McConnell has recently exercised his new-found freedom after stepping down as the GOP Senate majority leader to criticize Trump and his nominees for office. McConnell criticized Tulsi Gabbard, for example, for having a “history of alarming lapses in judgment” on Russia and China that he thought should have prevented her from becoming director of national intelligence (Mascaro, 2025), even though she was confirmed on February 12, 2025.
The preferred approach to Trump, especially by European government leaders, represents risk understood as a Black Jellyfish. The West seemingly grew so accustomed to the Rules-Based Order — “a system of laws, agreements, principles and institutions that the world came together to build after two world wars to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people,” as former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it — that any serious alternative was too unpleasant to think about (Tobin, 2025). This order does not seem to be guiding the Trump Administration, however, just as Vladimir Putin ignored it when he annexed Crimea in 2014 and attacked Ukraine in 2022 (Glickmann, 2022).
All four classic animal versions of Trump make sense depending on the risk manager’s viewpoint, and the metaphors may be helpful for selecting the best mitigation strategies. Black Swans are, by definition, impossible to predict, so we have to prepare for them by creating resilient anti-fragile systems and organizations able to improvise, adapt, and overcome the “unknown unknowns” without sacrificing fundamental values and ways of functioning. Spotting the Gray Rhino requires someone in the room to be the Devil’s Advocate and point to the obvious that everybody else ignores. The mitigation strategy towards White Elephants concerns a leader’s ability to kill their darlings through sound analysis and efficient decision-making processes. The Black Jellyfish risk is rare but predictable, and we should therefore be able to mitigate it if we know our history well and develop a language to speak about risks even if they make us uncomfortable.
So, there is hope for the risk managers of the world trying to make sense of Trump’s return to the White House. On leaving the Zoo of Risk, however, we meet the Bright Peacock, who walks around freely on the lawn outside the main gate. This majestic looking animal attracts a lot of attention from the visitors, especially when it spreads its colorful feathers with beautiful patterns and screams — mainly out of vanity but also to warn intruders. Recent incidents show that sometimes these warnings turn vicious; in 2021, a three-year-old was hospitalized after an encounter with an aggressive peacock in Paignton Zoo in England, and in 1997 a Thai man lost his life to an attack from one of his family’s caged peacocks near Bangkok. These attacks are rare, however. Peacocks do not represent severe risk to humans, although our perception of risk from them may be high because of their loud noises and bright colors.
Trump makes a lot of noise, but so far his threats to Panama and Canada have not materialized in attacks or annexation, but rather tariffs that will mainly impact American consumers with increasing prices (Chu, 2025). The real risk from the Bright Peacock is that we may end up spending too many resources mitigating a hazard that probably won’t occur or, if it does, will have minimal consequences. The problem, however, is that some Bright Peacocks control the world’s most powerful economic and military force. In those cases, you really don’t want to confuse them with a Black Swan, a Gray Rhino, a White Elephant or a Black Jellyfish.
So, which animal in the Zoo of Risk will Trump be to you? Perhaps we need an additional metaphoric animal to understand him correctly. Could it be that he is actually the Lion King who comes to save the savannah, drain the swamp and Make Animals Great Again? This large predator is instinct-driven, short-term focused, and prefers to eliminate competition rather than tolerate it. The Lion King applies the “Shock Doctrine,” amplifying crises to exploit chaos and implement radical policy changes as Ahmed Trabelsi argues in his recent commentary on “The Trump Administration and the Shock Doctrine in Action.” But while throwing hand grenades into every debate may secure some short-term wins for the Lion King, in the long run this approach may very well erode the transparency, accountability, and public consensus that his authority and legitimacy rests upon (Trabelsi, n.d.).
As evening approaches, we feel tired after a long day of animal-watching at the Zoo of Risk and head to a venue downtown to watch a show called “Democracy” starring two charismatic magicians performing with a Caged Tiger. They have done it for decades without thinking much about the dangers involved, as all the illusionist tricks and exotic animal interactions have become routine. The audience is amused, but suddenly the Caged Tiger attacks one of the magicians. It bites him in the neck, slices his vertebrae and serves an artery while dragging him around on the stage, almost killing him. We abandon our table and run away from the stage slicked with blood (Duggins, 2022). The weirdest thing about it all is that the two magicians later keep insisting that the Caged Tiger never meant to do any harm even if the show had to close and the audience never really recovered from the shock.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in the INSIGHTS publication series are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Rabdan Security & Defense Institute, its affiliated organizations, or any government entity. The content published is intended for informational purposes and reflects the personal perspectives of the authors on various security and defence-related topics.
References
Chu, B. (2025, Summer). Will Donald Trump’s tariffs hurt US consumers? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20myx1erl6o
Duggins, A. (2022, Spring). ‘It took four men and a fire extinguisher to get the tiger off him’: The tragedy of Vegas magicians Siegfried and Roy. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/17/vegas-siegfried-roy-tiger-wild-things-mystery-exotic-animal-sin-city-counter-terrorism
Glickmann, G. (2022, 10). Putin rejecting the rules-based global order makes the world more dangerous. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/16/putin-rejecting-rules-based-global-order-makes-world-more-dangerous/
Global Preparedness Monitoring Board. (2019). A World at Risk: Annual report on global preparedness for health emergencies. Global Preparedness Monitoring Board.
Mascaro, L. (2025, February 15). McConnell tests the strengths and limits of his power opposing a trio of Trump’s Cabinet nominees. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/mcconnell-tests-strengths-limits-power-opposing-trio-trumps-118818640
Mills, C. (2016, December 14). Trump Reveals Some Surprise at Winning. U.S. News & World Report. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2016-12-14/donald-trump-admits-he-was-a-little-surprised-at-election-outcome
Richter, A. (2021). NATO in the age of Trump: Alliance defense spending during the Trump presidency. Comparative Strategy, 40(3), 285–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/01495933.2021.1912511
Tobin, J. (2025, Spring). Challenges to a rules-based international order. House of Lords Library. https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/challenges-to-a-rules-based-international-order/
Trabelsi, A. (n.d.). The Trump Administration and the Shock Doctrine in Action. Academia.edu.
Wright, F. A., & Wright, A. A. (2018). How surprising was Trump’s victory? Evaluations of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and a new poll aggregation model. Electoral Studies, 54, 81–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2018.05.001
Zubel, M. (2025, March 2). Greenland tensions: Danish PM rebukes US over ally claims. MSN.Com. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/greenland-tensions-danish-pm-rebukes-us-over-ally-claims/ar-AA1ykFYp
